Brittney and the Bears Simply Cannot Lose

Undefeated seasons are a rarity in some sports, and a numerical impossibility in most others. When any team flirts with perfection, it behooves our inner spectator to sit up and pay attention. The Baylor Lady Bears are not the first women’s college basketball team to record a perfect season. Six other teams have accomplished that, most recently Connecticut in 2010. But Baylor is the first to round it out to an undefeated 40-0, rather than the 39-0, 35-0 and 34-0 of perfect teams past, making them historically immaculate.

There wasn’t much room to doubt that in Tuesday’s championship game against Notre Dame, which ended in a 80-61 blowout victory. It was close for a minute: The Fighting Irish trailed by only six points at halftime, hardly an insurmountable deficit. After that, Baylor’s season-long superiority kicked in, as Baylor outrebounded Notre Dame by an almost a 2-to-1 margin. As expected, Brittney Griner did nothing to dispel the consensus that she’s the best player in the country, filling out a massive stat line with 26 points, 13 rebounds and 15 blocks. “Griner’s legacy as a transcendent player was assured before the title game, but she can now stake her claim as the game’s greatest,” writes Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch. “She has led Baylor to a 101-13 record during her three seasons in Waco and is the first Division I player to record more than 2,000 points (she has 2,425) and 500 blocks (599).”

Griner would go first in this year’s WNBA draft but she’s pledged to return for her senior year, giving Baylor a remote chance at 80-0. When you think about the potential of such an overwhelming accomplishment, the fact that Griner can dunk seems pretty incidental to her résumé. “Given the hegemony of highlight reel basketball in the mainstream consciousness, it’s hard to imagine a world in which Griner’s college basketball legacy isn’t the fact that she can dunk. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Nate Parham writes for The Classical. “But to fully appreciate the women’s game as it currently stands, dunking has to become more of an afterthought for observers than the main event that Griner’s subsuming presence has made it in the mainstream, regardless of whether others come along and do it more often at some point in the future.”

That’s the premier matchup as advertised: Tiger vs. Rory, Old vs. New and whatever other parallels you want to conjure up. “If you want to view it as good against evil because of McIlroy’s boyish face and Woods’ messy personal life, go ahead,” Rick Morrissey writes for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Believe me, CBS won’t stop you.” That’s not entirely fair to competitors like Phil Mickelson and Luke Donald, but it is the easiest way to approach the bonanza. Besides, any preconceived notions or assumptions are just 24 hours away from being completely dashed to bits.

The new Woods, if there is such a thing, is not entirely the old Woods. Much has been made of Woods’s win at Bay Hill, his first in more than two years. Still, as Daniel Riley puts it in a profile for GQ, Woods has always appeared to be the same person, turmoil or not. His return to playing form is just that, and not material for a neatly packaged narrative about the redemptive possibilities of the human spirit.

“He walked off the eighteenth green Sunday to the chorus of his name being cheered as if it were the end of an underdog movie, ‘Rudy’ or ‘Rocky,’” he writes. “But why was Tiger winning so important to us, anyway? If we accept the whole mirage as we once did, doesn’t that make us suckers? What’s dishonest about Tiger now is not that he’s looking us in the eye and lying; it’s that he’s asking us to remain complicit in that grand lie of infallibility long after it’s been publicly obliterated. Golf is better with Tiger around. And in order to preserve his presence in its most electrifying form, it’s tempting to buy what he seems to insist: that he has organically improved, as both person and player, because of what he’s been through.”

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It’s a fact of age and gravity: Kobe Bryant can’t last forever, no matter how many secret German blood procedures he undergoes or how many packs of frozen peas he tapes to his knees. As Bryant has looked increasingly human this year despite impressive statistics – he leads the league in scoring, but is shooting the lowest percentage of his career since he was a rookie – it seemed inevitable that he would pass some of his responsibilities to Lakers center Andrew Bynum, who is averaging career-high numbers in almost every field while finally remaining healthy.

But what if Bynum isn’t ready to be The Man for non-basketball reasons? Throughout the season, his frequent displays of idle petulance have aggravated Lakers fans who’ve waited for him to mature over the last seven years. For the most part, coach Mike Brown has insisted everything is fine. That changed on Tuesday, when Bynum was fined for “numerous infractions,” such as skipping a meeting with Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak. He sat out the Lakers’ game against the New Jersey Nets, which the Lakers won 91-87, with a sprained ankle, and was expected to remain day-to-day. (The center has not yet addressed the suspension publicly.)

Bynum is not the first emerging star to give unconstructive criticism of his team, of course. But his malcontentedness certainly can’t help a Lakers team that’s struggled with chemistry questions all season long in a very real way, not with the playoffs less than a month away. “Andrew dealt with all the Chris Paul and/or Dwight Howard machinations without a real fear that he would be sent elsewhere,” writes Yahoo’s Kelly Dwyer. “He’s the rock, to hear his brain tell it, he’s not going anywhere, and he’s unhappy. And when the unmovable force is unhappy, he tosses out nonsense like this.”

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Nike’s NFL uniform redesignis not going to upset the natural order of things, at least for now. The Steelers still look like the Steelers, the Bears still look like the Bears, and so forth. Other than the Seattle Seahawks, who received a full-blown makeover courtesy of something called “Action Green,” most of Nike’s changes were barely cosmetic, focusing more on improved ventilation and mobility rather than fitting players for the runway. “Contrary to what many fans think, a uniform outfitter like Nike can’t just walk in and make design changes without a team’s permission,” writes Page 2’s Paul Lukas. “Nike is just a vendor supplying a service to a client, and in this case the client is the NFL, whose team owners are some of America’s most conservative businessmen. They’re not the sort of people who want their teams to look, for lack of a better term, wacky.” Lukas also points out that the NFL’s rules prevent teams from tweaking their uniforms more than once every five years, which is why the Seahawks were the only team to test the water.

But again, that’s for now. As that grace period slowly disappears, expect more teams to get into the game – teams like Jacksonville Jaguars, who are already rumored to be eyeing a black uniform design for next year. Who knew fashion could intersect so nicely with the gridiron?

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